By STEPHEN MILLER, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 25, 2005
http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/charlie-winans-inspirational-teacher/12724/
Charlie Winans, who died Tuesday at 85, was a teacher of outstanding vigor and unique, if sometimes eccentric, vision who inspired generations of young men at Brooklyn Preparatory High School and other Catholic institutions.
Taking as his touchstone the insight that God's creation must be good and therefore appreciated and enjoyed, Winans set about teaching with less-than-orthodox regard for classroom niceties. According to a former student who attended the teacher's wake yesterday in Cobble Hill, Winans was fond of putting a particularly revered figure in a corner of the chalkboard and drawing a descending chalk line across the width of it. He would start the class by saying, "It's been all downhill since Thomas Jefferson."
Winans was highly opinionated - scandalously so, according to some of his more conservative Jesuit colleagues - but had a capacious outlook on pedagogy. He taught a series of core courses on history, fine arts, literature, and philosophy as well as debate, and he directed school plays. Considering school hours and class syllabi as inadequate to encompass the buzzing complexity of the world, he ran a kind of ongoing "seminar of everything" from his living room.
At yesterday's wake, many former students - and even some non-students who had managed to find their way into Winans's living room - shared memories of listening to opera, preparing extra papers to present, and having their first taste of wine. Others had ranged further afield with Winans, following him for art history tours of the Cloisters and botanical field trips in search of the only cork tree in the Bronx. Some had been favored with trips to Europe, in which art history met anthropology and epic pub crawls.
According to the autobiography of a fellow teacher, Father Bill O'Malley S.J., "He had the body of Orson Welles and the soul of Francis of Assisi ... Charlie could drink till three, but he'd be up for Mass at six." Added Fr. O'Malley: "Charlie was the first fully realized Christian I ever met."
Winans grew up in Brooklyn, and his father was a telegraph operator on Wall Street. According to Winans's sister, Mary June O'Connor, Winans's father learned the trade from his stepfather, a Kentucky colonel in the Civil War. The colonel proceeded to teach Winans's father and his sister Morse code; Winans's aunt also became a professional telegrapher. She met her future husband, a Philadelphia telegrapher, online, as it were, thereby becoming among the earliest examples of cyberdating.
The Winans household, on Lincoln Road, was by all accounts a bookish place, and Winans's older sister also went on to become a teacher. Winans studied philosophy at Columbia with Thomas Merton, and went to work at Brooklyn Preparatory in the early 1950s; among his fellow teachers was a young priest named Daniel Berrigan. A supporter and acquaintance of Martin Luther King, Jr., Winans marched at Selma in 1965, but later told students that a personal commitment to nonviolence didn't mean you had to let somebody crack your skull.
Winans became friends with the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day. He boasted in later years that at one point he convinced members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, who resided on the same Lower East Side block where the Catholic Worker was housed, to repaint the organization's offices.
Just as Day sought to make the Gospels a direct and perceptible reality, Winans saw the holy in the mundane - and sometimes vice versa. When a van full of presents he was driving to critically ill patients on Roosevelt Island was stolen one Christmas Eve, he consoled a fellow volunteer by telling her, "Once you've become a friend of the Lord, you're bound to be shafted." This story was told by a high school teacher in Plainview, Long Island, Robert Ditolla, one of a score of mourners yesterday who credited Winans with inspiring them.
Fred Jonassen, a law professor at Barry University in Orlando, Fla., recalled that when the Jesuits decided to abandon Roman collars in the classroom in the 1960s, Winans promptly chose to wear one. It was not his only prank involving a collar - numerous students claimed to have witnessed Winans traveling with a clerical collar that he would don whenever the mood suited him, usually when it would put him at the front of a long line at an art exhibit.
If the drinking and deception make Winans sound less than serious, other students recalled him urging them onward, nearly forcing them to take advanced-placement examinations they thought themselves barely qualified for. Indeed, Winans seemed to place a great deal of emphasis on standardized tests. "He'd say, 'Find out about a girl's SAT scores,' because beauty doesn't last and you want to be able to have an intelligent conversation and companionship," a former student who now is headmaster of two Jewish private schools in North Miami Beach, Fla., Richard Barbieri, said.
"The central fact about Charlie was his ability to get kids to believe in themselves when they were riddled with self-doubt," a psychiatrist, Michael Scimeca, said. Mr. Scimeca recalled that Winans found it easy to tell stories mocking himself. Here's one about his excessive piety as a youth: "He told us that he used to eat pictures of saints, because he felt that he could incorporate their holiness," Mr. Scimeca said.
In recent years, with the help of several former students, Winans had gone to live in a Jesuit senior residence in the Bronx, the only non-Jesuit so privileged. Scholarships endowed in his name at Fordham included the proviso that their recipients must submit occasional reports directly to him, and that Winans met with and inspired young people.
A young actor at the viewing yesterday, Dale Langley, said that Winans had urged him to become a teacher, and he had recently taken a job teaching English at the Clara Barton High School for Health Professions, in Brooklyn. Mr. Langley said he had directed a performance of Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," availing himself of Winans's dramaturgy while basing the main character on him. "He was always teaching; it was how he lived," Mr. Langley said. "He really exemplified the embodiment of humanity. You can't really be sad now that he's dead. You sort of think, 'Wow, if Charlie's dead, maybe it's not so bad to be dead.' Even his darkest days were very happy."
Charles Francis Winans
Born December 31, 1919; died at New York University Medical Center on April 19; survived by his sister, Mary June O'Connor, and several nieces and nephews; he never married.